Under a pitch-black night, Holywell Academy let its usual blaze gutter out like a quenched braziers. After the king was assassinated, to keep magical resonance from stirring the scene, every arcane device, mana-crystal lamps included, went dark like a lake without wind. Patrols took their place, torches in hand, a slow river of orange embers.

That orange glow couldn’t wash the Academy clean. Corridor bends, garden thickets, and unused paths held pockets of shadow like ink pooling in bowls.

A soldier on duty watched a shape sway in the trees and shivered like a wet dog.

“Damn it, how many days has it been? The brass can’t find a thing, and we’re stuck in this ghost place where someone died.”

“What, missing that orc-woman you bought for three muhr in Little Mustache Alley?”

His older partner whistled, breath thin as reeds, and tapped the young man’s shoulder with a grin. “Her ass was big, sure. Just too much hair up top.”

“You old bastard who needs a nailed boot to the ass, where would real orcs even come from here? And she didn’t have fur!”

The younger soldier shrugged off the hand, face sour as vinegar. The older one sighed, shoulders sinking like damp canvas.

“Who doesn’t wanna go back? I finally had my rest rotation, then this mess hit. I haven’t seen my wife and girl in a year—ptoo.”

He spat into the grass, a dark fleck on green. “If you ask me, that damned king died and that’s that. He Above, keep this up and I’ll choke alive.”

Hearing the blasphemy, the young soldier hissed at him to lower his voice, eyes flicking around like sparrows, afraid trouble would perch nearby.

Neither noticed the shadow near the spit shift like a ripple.

They kept chatting and walked on. Once their backs slipped around the bend, the solid shadow in the trees melted like wax, revealing a black-robed figure.

Behind her veil, her brow lifted, and her scarlet eyes flashed open disgust, bright as fresh blood. Though she was still a ways from the filth, she stepped back and skirted wide like a cat avoiding a puddle.

Uncivil peasants; sending them here profanes Holywell Academy. The thought clicked in Adelaide’s chest like a bead against porcelain. Still, relief stirred like warm tea.

Thanks to ordinary soldiers holding the outer ring, she’d slid in under their eyelids as quiet as frost.

Sarman Empire’s elite knight-orders were guarding the king’s death site like iron walls. To pass them, a sight-thieving spell like “Rillman’s Confinement” wouldn’t cut it.

Her target wasn’t the assassination site anyway, but the more distant teaching wing, silent as a sealed shrine.

After forcing Skela and Neprah to trigger the flag to investigate the truth, she should have shadowed them, nudging the “script” back on track like a careful hand on a fan.

But she came here instead, pulled by a splinter under the nail.

Days of thinking, and something still felt wrong, a grit under the tongue.

Earlier deviations from the “script” were her own doing, ripples she kicked up. This assassination felt different in kind, a cold current from elsewhere.

Unlike stumbling into a battlefield and dropping into that underground pit, or befriending Skela and making him skip an event, she’d barely touched the king, her hands clean as paper.

Before she woke from the coma, Mira had already been placed under Belior’s name; what needed to happen had happened, fate written like ink on ledgers.

The royal household had no reason to approach the Douglas Family, and kept their distance like mountains in mist. For years, Adelaide seldom saw the king in public, much less swayed him.

In other words, she hadn’t stepped onto his path, yet his fate still strayed like a kite in a crosswind.

Why? Butterfly effect?

The word rose from the “Dream” in her heart like a pale fish. It was possible; she knew that. Yet wrongness pressed under her ribs like a shard of ice, especially when she recalled that chill flooding her body.

So she would return to the classroom where she’d felt that gaze and look again, eyes clear as a night pond.

If it was nothing, she’d hurry back to watch Skela and the others, patience folded like paper cranes. She made up her mind and refreshed a Quickstep spell, feet light as feathers.

When a cloud draped the moon for a heartbeat, she sprang and landed at a third-floor window like a swallow on eaves.

The window clicked, and dust breathed up in a pale veil as she slipped into the empty room.

Classes had paused since the assassination; no one had come here. The scene should’ve stayed intact, untouched like sealed rice jars.

She scanned the room once, then stood beside the vacant window she’d been watching that day, still as a figure in ink.

The first step to confirm no anomaly is to assume one exists, like testing a bridge by leaning.

Adelaide shut her eyes and drew a deep breath, letting her body loosen like silk unrolled.

If someone had stood here then, what would they do?

Red light brushed her fingers. When she opened her eyes, the silver-haired girl was no longer Adelaide, her gaze clouded like a pond at dusk.

Her eyes drifted without a target, a reed in wind. Her face shifted under the veil, now sad, now glad, a puppet mask changing with lantern light.

Only when her gaze slid through the window to the seat she’d occupied that day did her expression freeze, a particular cold smile pinned like frost.

Jealousy, pain, joy, and yearning rose together, a tide under moon. She stepped forward, like a child seeing her father home, leaning out with hands reaching for the sill.

Before her fingers touched wood, her hand stopped, a hawk pulling back in air.

Clouds peeled away, and silver moonlight washed the sill like milk over stone.

Like waking from a dream, she saw it: dust thinner there than elsewhere, a faint path brushed clean.

Her eyes darkened, storm behind glass. She fished an eyeball from her pocket and set it on that spot, pale as a lotus seed.

Psychological profiling.

It was a term she’d borrowed from the “Dream,” a label like a tag pinned to a specimen.

There, profiling was born of criminal psychology, an investigative craft. You step into the culprit’s shoes, read the scene like tea leaves, infer the mind, then rebuild the person.

Jiaqi in the “Dream” had only taken a freshman intro class; she knew the word, nothing more, a leaf on the surface.

Adelaide, who watched and toyed with hearts, excelled at it like a musician tuning strings. And unlike profilers there, she had an edge sharp as a knife.

As she could use brain tissue to copy someone’s magical affinity, she could suggest herself and rewrite her cognition for a time, forcing a pattern of thought like a mold.

This classroom wasn’t a murder scene. No blood, no scuffle marks, no glaring threads; in theory, profiling here should be hard, fog over a path.

But she knew the texture of the gaze she’d felt that day, a prickle on skin like frost bite.

By sacrificing a sliver of brain tissue, she copied that emotion and used it to reverse-engineer the owner’s moves, steps stitched like red thread.

Now she walked backward like a rewinding tape, motion uncanny as a spider’s dance. Every short span, she mimed a telling gesture and placed an eyeball there, round as pearls.

Soon, thirteen eyeballs lay in the room’s corners, a constellation smeared across the floor.

Her eyes chased their crooked track like a cat chasing light. A sharp, rapid chant spilled from her tongue, words clicking like beads.

She slit her fingertip; pain flared like a match. Blood fell like warm rain and, under her chant, stretched into a thin red line.

It snaked to the nearest eye, slipped into the blurred pupil, broke out of muscle, then hunted the next, threading them all like a rosary.

Then, like a heartbeat reborn, the bloodline swelled and shrank, a pulse under skin. Every eye turned with it, eerie and silent as owls.

Blood-Eye Reconstruction.

If her key profile data was right, given a while, these roaming eyes would replay the scene, shadows cast like lantern theater.

It was a costly piece of Blood Magic. Even with her Sacrifice Domain, Adelaide burned offerings and nearly a minute of accelerated chant, breath hot as forge air.

Even so, she didn’t want it to work. Best would be nothing, a blank screen. Then she was just paranoid, worry smoke in wind.

With that hope, she waited for the magic to ripen, silence thick as dew on leaves.

Halfway through, a voice not hers cut the air like a blade.

“If I recall right, the organization never issued you a uniform—Ms. Adelaide.”